Feminist, Decolonial Visual Narratives of Living Spaces: a Nonhegemonic Epistemological and Educational Alternative for Chile #1012029

This excerpt is part of the volume Visual Narratives, Aesthetics and Decoloniality: Imagery and the Construction of the ‘Other’. Vol. 1 – Decolonial Aesthetics, Ontologies and Epistemologies, edited by Tomás Cajueiro and Estevão Bosco, published by Ventura Edizioni.



Several authors have warned that the canon of thought at Westernised universities is fundamentally based on the theory produced by men from five Western countries: Italy, France, England, Germany and the United States (de Sousa Santos, 2010; Grosfoguel, 2013). These biased male theories have been disguised as neutral and universal and have formed the theoretical foundation of the human sciences to this day. In the academic discipline of architecture, defined in the 1st century BCE by Marcus Vitruvius as a sci- ence requiring “knowledge of many branches of study and varied kinds of learning” (1914, p. 5), the same situation has emerged. The patriarchal, male Western architectural theory that stands today has been developed over the centuries by men from the five Western countries cited above.